The Symbol without Meaning by Joseph Campbell

Author:Joseph Campbell [Campbell, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mythology, Mythogenesis, Anthropology, History of the swastika, History of human culture, Psychology, History of science, Catal Huyuk, Galileo, Columbus, Buddhism
ISBN: 978-1-61178-010-9
Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation
Published: 2013-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

The Wild Gander

The highest concern of all of the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has ever been that of suppressing the manifestations of individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developedand maintained in the public domain. For example, in India the idealof Dharma is that of an unconditional submission to the archetypes of caste—these being functions of the social order, rationalized for the individual by way of a theory of graded incarnations, through many lifetimes, from caste to caste. The sternest expression of this ideal is implied in the word “suttee” (satī), which is the feminine form of the verbal root sat, “to be.” A suttee is a woman who is something: namely, an archetypal wife. She has suppressed every impulse to become an autonomous individual, even to that final extent of throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. For in the archaic Orient, every act well performed is an act of suttee—a burning out, purging out, of ego.

In the Occident, too, ego has been regarded as the province of the devil. The Titans conquered by the Olympians were incarnations of this principle, just as the demons were in India —and we know how they were chained and imprisoned beneath mountains. A similar fate was accorded, in the Germanic tradition, to the giants and dwarfs, the Fenris Wolf, the Midgard Serpent, and the dog Garm. However, the day will come, we are warned, when their chains will drop away, and that day will be the Weird of the Gods, Ragnarök. Then shall nothing be without fear in Heaven or on Earth. (62)

But that day has already come—indeed, has been here since 1492, when the mandala broke that had been fashioned six thousand years before, in the period of the Halaf and Samarra bowls. Aeschylus, in Prometheus Bound, represented the spirit of the Titan who is now loose:

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